(De)meaning Information

Not long ago, PMB wrote a short post on bullshit. Part of what could reasonably be described as the Bullshit Revolution of the 21st century has been the rise of the cheap database, and the concomitant desirability of mining such databases for information relatively cheaply and easily.

For example, every time you shop for a book or a DVD on Amazon.com, Amazon automatically compiles databases of information about what you search for and what you purchase, taking this information as a proxy for recommending to you other items that you may be likely to purchase too. Most of us are familiar enough by now with "Web 2.0," by which users (or, in business terms, patrons) generate content and fill huge information databases for the very services they patronize. "Web 3.0," then, is vaguely characterized as a system in which, based often on prior user-generated information, we can produce computer-generated information that merges with real-time activity in our daily lives.

We seem to value information today as we always have, but with one very significant difference. Today, information means something very different than what it used to.

As this fascinating review explains, there came a point at which it was understood that information could be deployed more effectively were it understood as independent from meaning--what seminal information theorist and applied mathematician Claude Shannon understood as a mathematical abstraction instead:

The enormous success of information theory came from Shannon’s decision to separate information from meaning. His central dogma, “Meaning is irrelevant,” declared that information could be handled with greater freedom if it was treated as a mathematical abstraction independent of meaning.

This understanding still largely informs our means of compiling, distributing, and transferring information today. Our information is largely automated and industrialized, its "democratization" frequently just a democratization of the labor cost of generating information itself.

What each of us no doubt finds in our daily lives, however, is that despite all the information we have, and how easy and cheap it is to get it, we also trust our information less and less. While we continue to place tremendously high value on "information" writ large--information as abstraction--the material value of information is rather low. On any number of political websites, for example, one can read scores of patently false information masquerading as truth. Three people can reach a series of economic conclusions by looking at the same chart. The foods we're supposed to load up on and those we're supposed to stay away from seem to switch off and on every three years. And because information is so deeply and systematically commodified, false advertising and deliberately, meticulously, scientifically misleading information are the norm. This state of things has long since been called "information overload," among other names; but "overload" isn't the only problem. This is what happens when information "evolves" beyond meaning.

Much of this problem has to do with information's response to hypercapitalist demands. Quantifying all normative judgments is cheap and efficient, and quite often very accurate. Just like a processing line of tin cans on a conveyor belt can get filled with tomato soup faster and cheaper than by hand, quantitatively analyzing huge databases of information can mass-produce meaning, or at least a proxy for meaning. Causal relationships can be theorized or brought within a statistically acceptable margin of error. Meaning can come cheap and fast.

Right?

It's worth considering, on the contrary, that what we get from this mode of industrialized processing of mass information isn't actually meaning at all, in any traditional sense of the word. What we get is, simply, more information--a simulacrum of meaning that can be deployed toward innumerable ends, but hardly ever trusted for itself. In this sense, quantification of value, which was always supposed to debunk and render obsolete the unreliable prejudices of subjective judgment, has actually become the most powerful enabler of unrigorous subjectivity. Literally anyone can find "scientific information" to back up a subjective claim without doing the work--and taking the oh-so-expensive time--of applying themselves to reason, skepticism, and careful observation.

Labor Unions are Part of Capitalism

Because a cowboy governor in Wisconsin is attempting to eliminate collective bargaining for Wisconsin's public employees, and because Speaker John Boehner thinks it's better for America to eliminate a hypothetical 200,000 jobs if those happen to be Federal jobs, the US has witnessed a small labor rights resurgence. Conservative politicians continue to rail against the idea of workers' rights and labor unions as they more or less always have; but now we have some newsworthy examples.

So now would be a good time to inform conservatives that labor unions and collective bargaining are part of capitalism, not ancillary to it.

Conservatives love market competition, except when market competition provides challenges to corporate interests.

When corporations see an opportunity to gain an advantage over a competitor, they take it. Or at least, says Capitalism, they should. This is one reason why larger corporations sometimes merge with or overtake smaller corporations: sometimes acquiring a greater market share, or a more nimble production process, or a novel idea through a merger or acquisition can yeild a competitive advantage. By the same token, corporations don't like it when mergers between competitors freeze them out or set them at a disadvantage. When these things happen in business--when winners and losers emerge from tactical business decisions--it's not always about who has the best and cheapest product, or who produces the greatest demand; it's also about who controls the means of production, and who has the capital and the organization to deliver on novel ideas or products.

One kind of capital is human capital, or labor. Just like a paper company pays a price for the trees it turns into paper and the machines that process the trees, it also pays a price for the people it employs to run the machines that turn the trees into paper. If there's a scarcity of trees, the paper company pays a higher price for trees. If there's a scarcity of labor, the paper company pays higher wages for labor.

Well, strategically speaking, if people want to earn a higher price--a higher wage--for their labor, they can develop ways of making labor scarce, or of inflating the cost of labor: they can unionize and collectively bargain, threatening to refuse their services if their price isn't met.

Businesses do the same thing with each other. When a business has something that lots of people want, it raises the price. When a competitor produces something similar that lots of people also want, both prices come down. That's when businesses buy up or merge with competitors to expand market share and drive prices back up. Or, that's when businesses employ any number of other strategic means of outwitting their competitors. This is competition.

But when workers employ strategies to achieve common or collective employment rights goals, pro-business conservatives don't like to call it competition. They prefer to let businesses compete, but not workers, blaming labor unions for creating the same kinds of market inefficiencies that businesses create every day by the same basic practices.

This is called hypocrisy.

Speculations on Teaching and Studying 'Literature' Part II

PMB's not particularly well written Part I argued two basic points:

1) Many of those who study literature lack a foward-looking or future-oriented mentality when it comes to approaching the study of literature.

2) As a result, as the world moves on in various ways, literature scholars will have to respond to accusations of obsolescence with innovation within the field.

PMB recognizes that these two formulations sound more like the jargon of one of the greatest enemies of progress in any endeavor: corporatization. So, to add substance to the arguments roughly outlined in Part I, PMB proposes Part II, an elaboration on what is meant by 'innovation':

In Part I, PMB suggested that the last real innovation in literary study was the post-structuralist intervention of the 1970s-80s. Post-structuralism was itself a major structural break in the study of literature. Whereas before the post-structuralist intervention, literary scholars mainly addressed aesthetic questions (what is the form of this piece of writing?; is this a work of art?; what is being communicated in this art form?; how is this work related to other works in its period?, etc.), after this intervention literary scholars began to address layers of meaning not just within, but beyond a piece of writing as 'work of art.' Put simply, this was a major innovation because it conceived of literature not just as art to be studied as art, but as a kind of social-historical document that says something about how we live, what we think, what's going on in the world, and how we relate to the goings-on.

In this sense, innovation is not just a creative way of thinking about a particular piece of writing (no doubt scholars have been doing this since the post-structuralist intervention), but a systematic change in the methods and perceived purpose of the field. Post-structuralism, which hailed primarily from a number of French scholars occupying fields called 'the human sciences,' shifted the scholarly emphasis from literature-as-art to literature-as-document, thus shifting our scholarly purpose from being or becoming experts on literary taste to being or becoming experts on the written word as a record and a driver of human behavior.

In some ways, this innovation of the 1970s-1980s hasn't even fully sunk in, and has been resisted both from within and from beyond the field. Today, for example, the term 'literary criticism' still prevails.

'Literary criticism' is an obsolete term, and a misleading term as a result. Unlike art critics or food critics, those who study literature--generally mislabeled 'literary critics'--are not necessarily purveyors of taste. The purpose of literary study is not to provide people with a sense of which books are 'good' or 'great,' or even to assess the artistic or aesthetic value of a literary text. True, those who study literature are generally best equipped to make assessments of the artistic or aesthetic value of literature, and they often do just that; but this is occupational hazard for the literature scholar--a corollary activity that markets demand and sometimes even pay (modestly) for. Reviewing a book in order to give the 'lay' reader a sense of its artistic or aesthetic value--what literary critics have in the past (in the times of literary criticism proper) termed its 'literary value'--is a side activity to the core function of literary study, analogous to what the production of better television technologies has been to the core work of plasma physicists. In other words, the most publicly visible function of a given pursuit is not necessarily its only or even most important function; and this is certainly the case for those who study literature. While there remains an abundance of people who still believe that what matters most about a book is whether it is 'good literature,' the work of telling people, via arguments from authority, what they ought to think is 'good' and what they ought to think is trash is not work PMB is prepared to hang his hat upon.

What we call 'criticism'--literary criticism, art criticism, food criticism, film criticism, and all other formulations of taste-making industry--is not and has never been about transcendent value, but contingent value, as Barbara H. Smith suggested in 1988. These forms of criticism respond to broader economies of value--markets for taste--and not some transcendent greatness. This is a truth that all contemporary 'literary critics' know very well--or at least have been taught very well--but are frequently happy to ignore if it means holding onto that sliver of broader political and economic influence: the ability to speak and write with authority about the undeniable ability of literature to mesmerize us all, and attribute that mesmerizing effect to some mythical aesthetic quality or great complexity that economists, political scientists, sociologists, physicists, biologists, neurologists, etc. have repeatedly failed to grasp.

In short, 'literary critics' have relied for too long on their ability to say interesting and compelling things as critics, or purveyors of taste. PMB finds it far more interesting and compelling to approach the relationship between literature and people in a vastly different way, not about what people and history tell us about literature, but what literature tells us about people and history. The first thing to be said about literary criticism, then, is that 'literary criticism' is both the wrong term and the wrong approach to the study of literature.

PMB will explain further in Part III, forthcoming.

Speculations On Teaching and Studying 'Literature' Part I

A phenomenon: when a scientist applies for a research grant, s/he often has much of the groundwork completed for the proposed project. Why? Because science researchers often spend around half of the duration of a funded project gathering data for the current project, and the other half working toward the next project. Of course this isn't always the case, but it happens, and it's sort of cool.

One of the very cool things about scientific research is that it's generally very forward-thinking and future-oriented. Accordingly, you wouldn't fault a scientist today for having not yet cured a disease or invented a way to travel from Australia to Mexico in an hour. On the contrary, the value of scientific possibility is precisely what commands funding for research.

When it comes to the study of literature, however, the idea of future-orientation is usually taken as a joke, not just by people who think there's no such thing as non-scientific innovation, but from literature scholars themselves. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule, of course; but what passes for 'innovation' in literature scholarship and in disciplinary organization today is generally about reclaiming something lost, rather than positioning for something new. PMB is more than sympathetic with a number of ideas about the extent to which literature is undervalued in today's world; but there's a lot more to this picture.

Arguably the last significant innovation in literary scholarship--an innovation which, incidentally, rendered English departments the perceived intellectual powerhouses of the university at the time--was the rise of French post-structuralism in the late 1970s. Heavily derided (Derridaed?) today, the post-structuralist turn nonetheless represented an important break in the intellectual history of literary study. It blurred disciplinary boundaries between literature, philosophy, and the social sciences, allowing literary scholars to look beyond tired approaches to a weary set of canonical 'literary works.' Today, many would look back on this moment as the beginning of the end of literary study, blaming it for all subsequent funding and public-relations problems of English departments. In some ways, those people are correct. But what we should take from this last major point of disciplinary innovation is not that 'there is nothing outside the text,' or any of the cryptic aphorisms of this intellectual movement, or that post-structuralism was the death of literary study, but that it's important, and maybe even beneficial, for disciplines to develop over time, rather than let themselves stagnate as relics of a bygone era. Because that's what they're saying about the study of literature, in case you haven't heard:

Obsolete.

Useless.

If a bunch of idle, rich bohemians want to laze around reading books all day while the rest of us get on with the business of life in the 21st century, let them be (but don't expect us to pay for it).

Sure, there's no point in letting go of some of the legitimately undervalued aspects of literary study that have long since been central to the profession. There's no point in capitulating to the arguments of the naysayers, nor in allowing the debate to be framed only in the naysayers' terms. But this doesn't mean, either, that we'll find all the answers to our problems by looking backward, or by attempting a glorious return to a mythical time when a literature professor was like Tom Hanks' Robert Langdon, Harvard Professor of 'Symbology,' gallivanting about the globe saving the world with ancient knowledge.

What's the next move, then?

Teaching Students How To Bullshit

In his essay-turned-bestseller "On Bullshit," philosopher Harry Frankfurt argues that bullshit is actually "a greater enemy of the truth than lies are," because, whereas a liar conceals a known truth, a bullshitter attempts to advance or persuade without any regard for the truth whatsoever.

One unlikely thing we can take from this theory of bullshit: if bullshit is a prime enemy of truth, bullshitting must be a very valuable skill.

You can choose to understand this in very different ways. If you are something of a utilitarian who cares less about the ethics of process and more about outcomes, you might say that teaching someone how to bullshit is excellent preparation for success in many a career. If, on the other hand, you have an ethical concern with the idea of self-advancement at the expense of truth, you might take Frankfurt's position that bullshit is the enemy.

Either way, there's a case to be made for the value of teaching students how to bullshit. In one sense you would be imparting a skill that most everyone successful will tell you off-the-record is something of a requirement. In the other sense you can expose the sly rhetorical tactics and signposts of bullshittery by showing students what a bullshit proposition looks like from the inside out.

Indeed, the ability to take something of seemingly no value and convince others of the hidden value within it is a skill one first needs to master before one understands how to counteract.

Sick of Justifying the Humanities

Over at CHE-Brainstorm there's another one of these discussions about how or whether to argue for the generalized social value of the humanities. Most of these kinds of discussions are framed as follows:

1) The humanities are radically different from the sciences (C.P. Snow). And
2) the sciences are thought to be useful and the humanities are not. And
3) people have a general sense that the humanities are good somehow, but don't know how. Therefore
4) the argument is made to justify the use-value and/or goodness of the humanities. So
5) the humanities are either useful because they make us better citizens and teach us important skills (Nussbaum) or
6) the humanities are good because they are beautiful and magical and transcendent.

Some of these arguments are good and some are bad. Some are helpful for humanities scholars and some are not. Some are more convincing to non-humanities scholars (i.e. scientists) than others. If you've read PMB on these issues in the past, you'd know that he generally favors Item 5 above against Item 6, largely rejects Item 1, sympathizes with Item 2 but finds it flatly unjustified, treats Item 3 with less attention than he should, engages avidly in behaviors pertaining to Item 4 (as perhaps now).

Ultimately, though, these arguments are getting stale. All of them, really. And beyond that, it just doesn't look all that great for Team Humanities that we've somehow allowed ourselves to begin negotiations from a largely self-imposed disadvantage, rather than from even ground. What PMB means by this is that most in the humanities--the ones who are really supposed to know why this stuff is supposed to be so great--are themselves the first to begin arguing from the defensive.

Frankly, in no radical departure from the empiricist tradition, if people want to understand the value of the humanities, they ought to just pick up their heads from these tired arguments and look around with their own eyes. The government funding isn't exactly rolling in, but that political problem doesn't negate the observable fact that the world is full of examples of people crediting the humanities for their success, using humanities products as ways of explaining or relating problems to a broad populace, successfully extending their humanities training, talents, and skill-sets in the worlds of science and finance themselves, or, simply, just sitting and reading on a park bench with a level of literacy that goes beyond absolute baseline comprehension. Sure, PMB can make (and has made) more sophisticated arguments tailored to address particular popular criticisms of the humanities that put humanities advocates on the immediate defensive; but perhaps a better place to start--a better place to have started all along--is with the very kinds of empiricism and democratization of information that the world so seems to crave.

One side of this approach, then, is to be open about what the humanities (and the people who study them) do each and every day (and marvel at the range of impressive things that these people do each and every day). Stop condensing all fields to a self-sealing cost-benefit ratio of tuition in/salary out, and recognize that people take all sorts of paths to productive employment and successful careers, and that tying these outcomes to a particular disciplinary type is a really messy business.

The other side, of course, is recognizing exactly what the sciences are, and what science people do every day. This means taking account of, in addition to all the wonderful and laudable things we hear about in the news, all of the waste, the exploitation of labor, the unethical practices, the failures, the dead ends, the corporate and monetary drivers, the fudging and distortion of data...do I leave anything out?

I suppose the point here is that once you get sick of being on the defensive, you might consider going on the attack. Make no mistake about it: PMB does not advocate academic warfare and/or unwarranted disrespect of other longstanding and legitimate fields of inquiry. But if you live in world in which you're constantly being demeaned, ridiculed, marginalized, and bullied--and oh yeah, they're taking your lunch money too--is it always wrong to swing back?